Some books are made to jerk tears out of stone hearts. Some books make you want to laugh, cry and then have a piece of cake all at the same time.

Before We Say Goodbye is a tear-jerker in its own right, and will elicit tears from far more worthy souls than mine - but this writer's heart of stone remains unmoved. This is not to say this book is no good. This book is quite something, actually.

The story goes like this: When Maggie Lane, absent mother and free-spirit, passes away, her daughter Olivia has to come to terms with the scars left behind. Having grown up without a mother's presence in her life, she is determined to not follow the same path with her husband and two sons.

But something inside Olivia has broken and changed with the death of her mother. A mother with whom her relationship is estranged at best, destroyed at worst, a mother with a last trick up her sleeve.

Maggie has left Olivia a scrap of paper with an address on it. The address is to an old teenage flame, a man she loved all her life but was forced to abandon due to the strained and frustrating dynamics of her home and her family.

She is extremely puzzled, but something inside her needs to see this man again. Her mother's death had unsettled her so deeply, so profoundly, that she takes off to see this man and leaves her husband behind. She finds him as she remembered him, and begins to fall in love all over again.

No need to explain that things start to spiral out of control as her husband wants her home and yet she wants to stay with this man with whom she had long loved and pined for.

With a flawless, simple, direct and moving writing style, Candlish is quite masterful. While these titles (secretly I call them 'Emo' books) have never appealed to me, I quite related to the characters, and wanted to read more.

It won't win awards or move mountains or change the face of literature forever, but it is a good read that has much more meat and human element than the factory-processed titles in similar genres.